Wednesday, August 09, 2006

More about St. Louis

Wednesday, Aug. 9

Life will be your treasure box, filled with the sparkle of laughter,the gleam of adventure the shine of discovery, the flash of magic.”--Author Nora Roberts

They say ‘timing is everything’ and more often than not it proves right. For instance, if mid-July’s raging rainstorm that left parts of St. Louis without electricity for up to a week, or if the USPCA Conference had been scheduled a couple weeks earlier, what a disaster that could have been. Not just the electricity factor, but also the disrupted transportation system, damaged homes and buildings and fallen trees. The RV park where I stayed was filled with insurance casualty inspectors, and the city’s maintenance crews were still cleaning up debris.

While I was sorting and organizing things for today’s drive, I found some notes I took on my bus rides:

On weekdays, the buses on route #97 ran every 15 minutes; on the weekends it was every 30 minutes. This was a convenient way for me to get around.

The RV Park is in the “Locust Business District” that is made up of mostly abandoned buildings along trash littered streets. There are signs of redevelopment, though. AT&T and Edwards occupy two large high-rise buildings and several abandoned buildings advertise: “coming soon loft apartments.”

A woman on the bus had a t-shirt that said: ‘I’m strange, maybe even crazy; but there’s never a dull moment.’

The bus passed quite a few Baptist churches and the Salvation Army building.

A drug delivery? One young man dropped a small package under the seat as he left the bus and another man boarded the bus and picked the package up. Hmmm!

I was often the only Anglo on the bus. With just a couple exceptions, no one responded to my cheerful smile and ‘hello.’ In fact, even people who seemed to be traveling together did not smile and/or talk to each other.

In the older parts of the city, nearly all homes were made of red brick.

Today I drove south to Old Davidsonville State Park just inside the Arkansas border. Along the way I stopped at a WalMart for supplies. Now I know that some of you are ‘anti-WalMart’ but if you drove a motorhome you might change your mind. The stores are easy to find (tall, bold sign), I can get in and out of the parking lot without having to back up, there’s plenty of space for me to take up four slots at the empty end of the parking lot, and inside I can find everything I need. Now if they would just add WIFI!